I'd also like to say that this also happens with churches. Every church I've enjoyed didn't own their own building. Rather, they just rented space from the local high school, etc. These groups were extremely focused on building tight-knit communities, and were pretty free to adapt to changing circumstances. Conversely, I can think of a few churches with buildings, where the primary focus of the staff was maintaining enough donations to pay the mortgage.<p>This sort of phenomena applies to other communities in addition to technology businesses.
This is one of Parkinson’s Laws: "perfection of planned layout is only achieved by institutions on the point of collapse."<p>In the chapter "Plans and Plants" of "Parkinson's Law" (see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Parkinsons-Law-Cyril-Northcote-Parkinson/dp/1568490151" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Parkinsons-Law-Cyril-Northcote-Parkins...</a> ) he makes the point that<p>"During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death."<p>Parkinson reviews a number of headquarters buildings: League of Nations, Pentagon, St. Peter’s Basilica, Versailles,.... He concludes that their completion marked the sunset of the organizations that they were intended to house.
Jeez, I hate this attitude... that the only way a company can succeed is if you suffer. You spend all friggin' day at the office. It doesn't have to be a coalmine for the company to succeed. On the contrary. When a startup gets to the point that it needs to recruit the top talent, it better have nice working conditions. Look at Amazon today... crappy offices, pride in using doors as desks, and huge turnover among the development staff. Where are the Amazon engineers going? Google and Microsoft.
So is it a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't"? How do startups expand when they really have outgrown that little hole in the wall without losing the startup culture that allowed the initial success?<p>Is the curse of the new building unavoidable?
This happened to me when our company moved at the height of the 1st dot com boom and ended up burdened with space that caused us to close (rumor said about $1mill / 100 people). It certainly was months of disruption. In my neighborhood I can think of Sun, Netscape, Bay Networks and SGI that had this happen. The big move is at least an indicator to look twice.
What an excellent set of observations! I have been around and witnessed organizations going through the same mindset and pretty much watched the same tragic downfalls happen.<p>I personally witnessed this professionally in ministry settings as well as tech companies. Very interesting.